balance on…ten foods that help give you a Super Diet

Super foods: fact or fiction?

You can't have failed to escape the press coverage over the last few years about 'super foods' and all of the good things that they contain. The idea is simple; these foods are supposedly healthier than their counterparts because they contain high levels of a wide variety of substances, including:

    •   Vitamins

    •   Minerals

    •   Isoflavones and flavonoids

    •   Phytoestrogens

    •   Polyphenols

    •   Antioxidants

You're probably thinking, they all sound very fancy, but what are they and what do they do for me? Well, without getting too complicated, here's a brief description of each and their importance.

Vitamins 

These are a diverse range of organic compounds that the body needs to get from diet to be able to work properly. They help your body do everything from grow and repair to producing energy and boosting your defences against disease.

Minerals 

These are different to vitamins as they are inorganic, that is they have never been alive. The body still needs them to function and stay healthy though. They are always solids and made up a range of chemical elements. Sodium and potassium are examples of minerals, and roles include maintaining fluid balance in your body, ensuring your heart pumps effectively and building strong bones and teeth.

Isoflavones, flavonoids phytoestrogens and polyphenols 

A range of compounds that you get from things that were alive, namely plants and animals, the latter containing them because they have eaten plants. These compounds have a lot in common with vitamins; in fact flavonoids up until the 1950s were often referred to as vitamin P. Today you'd probably only use that term in relation to the colour of your wee when you've taken your effervescent vitamin c tablets! 

Collectively, any nutrient that comes from a plant is called a phytonutrient.

Antioxidants

Have you ever watched Star Wars? It's the classic battle of good versus evil, light versus dark. Inside your body there's an interstellar war going on every day to keep you in balance. An army of Antioxidants, think of them as Jedi Knights, defend you against Free Radicals, or Darth Vader's army, hell bent on destruction. 

As you know, your body needs oxygen to survive, that's why we have to breathe to live. Unfortunately, oxygen is a highly reactive substance. We know this as we can see the effects it has on cars and boats over the years. As they are exposed to air and water, they begin to rust, and there is a process that occurs in your body every day known as oxidation, which is effectively internal rusting. It is one of the things that causes you to age.

This process occurs as a result of using oxygen to produce energy for life. As a consequence, free radicals are produced. These are atoms that have effectively lost an electron and as a consequence go a little bit haywire, or to use our earlier analogy, have gone over to the dark side. They search around the body looking for another electron to get back into balance and back to the light. In their efforts though they can leave behind a path of destruction.

Your antioxidant defence system come armed with spare electrons, which they donate to any free radicals that they meet, turning them back into stable atoms that function normally. Remember when Darth Vader becomes good again in Return of the Jedi? This happens in your body every day, as long as you have the right amount of antioxidants available to defend you. And this is where the notion of 'super foods' comes from, with some things that you can find on the supermarket shelves containing a wide range of these healthy substances.

It certainly cannot be argued that some foods contain a massive amount of these health-promoting goodies and it is worth having them in your diet. The truth is though that your body needs a wide range of these nutrients to function at its best; as with everything it's about balance. You can eat tonnes of blueberries, knowing that they're packed full of antioxidants, but if this is all you eat you won't be getting many of the other substances that you need. Instead of thinking about super foods, focus instead on Super Diets, consuming a wide range of plant substances to give your body everything it could possibly need to stay healthy, grow and function at its best. Remember here that the word diet simply means the foods that you eat; it has absolutely nothing to do with restricting foods or calories.

How are super foods measured?

One helpful measurement is the ORAC value of a food, or the Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity. This tells you how many free radicals a food can turn back from the dark side, stabilising them and decreasing the risk of damage to your body. So which food is the Yoda or Luke Skywalker of your diet? Learn about the ORAC values of different foods here.

Below I've provided you with ten foods that can contribute effectively towards a Super Diet. You'll notice that there a wide range of colours on show here and a great little rule to remember is the 'Rainbow Rule', ensuring that your shopping trolley always contains foods that are a wide range of colours. Sorry to disappoint you here, but Skittles don't count!

Image courtesy of Kangshutters/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Super Food	What’s in it?	What can I eat it with?
Broccoli	Extremely rich in vitamin C, as well as good amounts of vitamin A, B6 and calcium. All dark green vegetables are a superb source of folic acid too, particularly essential for women during pregnancy	Perfect with stir-fries or traditional roast dinners
Blueberries	Rich in flavonoids called anthocyanins, blueberries have been shown to be effective in reducing blood pressure and managing blood sugars to help control diabetes	Perfect as a healthy snack or in yoghurts or porridge
Tomatoes	High in levels of lycopene, an antioxidant that has been strongly linked with cancer prevention. Also a good source of vitamin C	A food that pretty much goes with anything, from salads to sandwiches, or even roasted and served with fish
Kale	Just 50 grams will give you your daily requirements of vitamin A and C, helping with your immune system, eye health and a host of other benefits	Perfect steamed with meat or fish, or as part of a warm casserole on a cold night
Ground cloves	Spices and herbs are packed full of antioxidants, in fact they contain more than any other food on earth. Cloves are particularly rich in manganese, a mineral important for healthy bones and skin	Perfect in game  recipes, try one of these instead of the usual Sunday roast.
Dark chocolate	The cocoa, or cacao plant is packed full of antioxidants and linked to heart health, blood sugar control and brain function	Opt for 70% dark chocolate and have one or two squares as a snack
Raspberries	Another food that provides lots of vitamin C and manganese, they are also rich in fibre for bowel health	Mix into a salad with sunflower seeds to add extra flavour, or add to porridge for additional sweetness
Raw ginger	Another spice packed with a massively high ORAC score, reported to help with digestive health and as an anti-inflammatory	Add one or two slices of raw ginger to hot water with lemon and honey
Walnuts	Rich in Omega-3 fats that are vital for energy production, brain health and in preventing inflammation	Mix with berries and take to work in small Tupperwear pots for mid-morning and mid-afternoon snacks
Turmeric	A rich yellow-orange spice related to Ginger, rich in curcumin, an antioxidant linked to relief from stomach problems and arthritis	A great addition to curries to add vibrant colour and flavour

Hopefully this has given you some thoughts and ideas about what to put in your shopping basket next time you're in the supermarket. Remember the rainbow rule and you'll go a long way towards boosting your health. Also bear in mind that a healthy body is much better to able to process energy, build lean muscle to boost metabolism, and remove waste.

Focus on a healthy diet and a healthy weight is far more likely.

Balance your life, balance your scales

Paul

PS, if you're keen to know more you can now follow me on Twitter @paulw_fitness 

Eat…..Ten Steps to Healthy Eating

The balance weight loss programme is made up of four easy-to-follow stages:

• think

• eat

• live

• move       

Of these, one that many people want to know more about is eat.

 

We believe in educating you to understand about healthy eating and empowering you to make your own choices in your diet. After all, you're going to eat every day for the rest of your life so it's vital that you don't have to rely on us or someone else to tell you what to put in your mouth.

Instead we help you to make simple changes, one at a time if you wish, to your eating habits in order to help your body function better, improve your health and energy levels, and as a result, reach a healthy weight too.

We do this through our 'Ten Steps to Healthy Eating', taking the ten most important aspects of any healthy diet, giving you a simple questionnaire to assess how you're doing in each, and then providing you with the tools and support to make changes to any of the steps that you wish. It really is a case of 'one step at a time.'

                                          Image courtesy of pakorn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

To give you an idea of what our Ten Steps look like, we've included a short extract from our book, due out soon that works alongside the questionnaire to help you identify what you need to change, why it is important, and most importantly how you can make the changes in a way that you can stick to forever. We hope you like it and find it helpful.

Step 1: Timing is everything – when to eat

This is a good place to start. It helps you to realise that healthy eating is not only about how much you eat, when you consume food is also important.

You’ll have heard many things about when to eat foods, possibly including:

                          Never eat carb’s after 4pm.

                          Don’t consume carbohydrates and fat together.

                          Make sure that you every three hours on the dot regardless of the type of food that you eat!

To date science doesn’t strongly back up any of the above statements. Whilst they may work for some people, this is most likely because the first two will restrict the amount of food that can be consumed, limiting calorie intake and leading to weight loss. The diet that the latter point is based on also limits the calorie intake allowed.

So what evidence and common sense advice is there out there for when to eat?

Start the day right

The number one message from the scientific literature at present appears to be to eat breakfast. Various studies have reported benefits of consuming breakfast (Wyatt et all, 2002, Berkey et al, 2003, Elfhag and Rössner, 2005, Schlundt et al, 1992). Eating breakfast is likely to:

   Balance blood sugars.

   Prevent unhealthy snacking later in the day.

   Regulate mood, which can affect eating choice.

   Be part of a set eating routine, which has been shown to be effective for weight loss and maintenance.

   Increase metabolic activity, increasing the rate of calorie burn.

So what is a ‘good’ breakfast? This is a great time to get rid of the idea of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ foods. A food that may be good for one person may well be bad for another, and a food that might be bad at one time may be great at another, even for the same person. Take a Mars Bar for example, sat on the couch in the evening having done no exercise all day and having just had a big dinner, a Mars Bar may be considered a bad food. If you’ve just run 20 miles though in training for a marathon and are feeling a little shaky from low blood sugars, a Mars Bar becomes a good food. It’s all about balance! Finding the right foods at the right time for the right purpose.

Of course, in general terms, some foods may be considered better balanced and healthier than others, so rather than tell you a food is good or bad, we prefer to use a balanced scale to show you examples of foods that may well help you lose weight and be healthy, and others that most likely will not. Everyone is different so you may need to play around to find your balance but hopefully this serves as a handy tool for you. Generally, the least healthy foods are ones that some would argue aren’t even foods at all, heavily processed and full of refined ingredients, whilst the healthiest tend to be closer to their natural state.

Out of balance	Better balance/room for improvement	Well balanced
Missing breakfast or just having tea or coffee	Having a small snack on the go	Making time for a proper breakfast
Fried foods e.g. fried bread or fried eggs Processed sausages or bacon	Baked beans on toast	Boiled eggs Scrambled eggs Poached eggs Unprocessed, organic, local meats e.g. steak, sausages or bacon fresh from the butchers Oily fish e.g. sardines, mackerel, salmon, pilchards
White toast	Wholemeal toast	Dark, wheat free breads like spelt or rye
Margarine and processed spreads Shop bought jam or marmalade Peanut butter made with added sugars	Marmite, honey, homemade jam or marmalade, or non-organic butter	Natural organic butter Unrefined peanut butter e.g. Whole Earth Unrefined almond butter
Breakfast cereals (e.g. Coco Pops, Frosties, Corn Flakes or similar) Cakes and pastries Breakfast biscuits or cereal bars	Muesli Bran muffins	Porridge
Heavily sweetened or sugary yoghurts	Flavoured natural yoghurt	Low fat plain yoghurt Natural live yoghurt, organic where possible
Juice from concentrate or shop bought smoothies Sugar or sweeteners in hot drinks Fizzy drinks (sugary or diet) Meal replacement drinks Stimulant canned drinks Milkshakes	Homemade fruit smoothie Tea/coffee (not as a replacement for food) No added sugar squash Protein shake	Vegetable juice Herbal or fruit teas Water Milk
Chocolate Sweets	Dried fruit	Fruit Vegetables (e.g. asparagus with eggs and smoked salmon) Nuts and seeds

If you want to know more, or find out about the other nine steps, please do get in touch, we're always happy to answer questions and you can have a free face-to-face, telephone or Skype consultation.

info@balanceweightloss.co.uk

0775 200 1203